Heather Cox Richardson

We just have to hang on to what we had in the 1920s because that was the best.

And, you know, that was a cramped world that excluded most of us.

So let's not go back to the 1920s.

And that's that angle of are we looking for an expansive economy, an expansive world, an expansive intellectual understanding of the 21st century?

Mm-hmm.

Or are we going to go back to the – if Trump talks one more time about William McKinley, my head's going to explode because it wasn't a great time, you know?

Well, McKinley and his people were, but, you know, talk to the little girls who were working in the factories.

I was talking with another historian the other day, and we were mutually expressing extraordinary frustration because, you know, in fact, one of the things that's cool about history is that you can't look at tomorrow and know what's going to happen.

You know, you can kind of read the tea leaves, and we know a lot about what has happened, but not about the future.

But one of the things that we can all say with great clarity is,

is we know exactly how this turns out when a group of people try to monopolize resources, close the expansion of their societies, and turn everybody else into their serfs, basically.

Vassals, right.

We don't know if it's going to happen tomorrow or in five years or in 10 years or in 40 years, but

It always, always, always ends up the same way.

And to sit there and watch us playing this out step by step by step, you know, a lot of us are like, can we just go to that last scene because we all know what that last scene is going to be.

Now, if we do the other thing where we empower individuals to –

you know, to innovate and to, you know, to move and to do the things that they do best.

We don't know how that's going to turn out.

We know it's going to create a world that you and I can't even imagine.

And given those two options, man, why on earth would you choose, you know, sorry, but the pitchforks and piano wire?